Columbia educator Aline Kultgen remembers the Holocaust

Aline Kultgen sits in her living room on Monday. Kultgen was born in France and grew up during the German occupation of World War II. She spoke at the Mizzou Hillel about the Holocaust.¦William Lounsbury

Kultgen, a retired French teacher who has lived in Columbia for almost 40 years, often speaks to groups about the Holocaust and how her family left Paris and struggled to make a living by farming after the Germans occupied France.

She talks about the French who suffered under the Nazis, including her father who worked for the Resistance, was arrested, brutally interrogated and killed.

“When people think
about the Holocaust, they usually think about Eastern Europe: Germany, Poland
and the Ukraine, but it was happening all over in Europe, she said.

Later she came to America with an aunt and uncle, studied at the University of California-Berkeley, moved around the country, finally settled in Columbia and taught in the public schools.

For most of those years, she has dedicated her life to fighting for peace and educating others. She is a firm
believer that if the past is forgotten, it is doomed to be repeated.

It was May 10, 1940, when the Germans began their push into Belgium, Holland and, ultimately, France. After France surrendered on June 22, the Nazis divided the country into what they called the Occupied Zone in the north and a Free Zone in the south.

Nearly 76,000 Jews in France were deported to the death camps in the early 1940s, but Kultgen and her parents managed to keep a low profile in the south, which was under a puppet German government but unoccupied by soldiers.

Kultgen, 72, doesn't consider herself a Holocaust survivor. She thinks the words are more appropriately applied to the tiny fraction of European Jews who managed to escape death in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

She was too young to remember what her home country was like prior to Nazi occupation, she said. Nor does she remember much about her biological parents, who had died by the time she left for America at age 9.

“I
had a normal childhood in some ways,” she said. “I knew that things were
going on and I was scared, but I’m not sure to what extent I understood.”

Her father, Yves, was born in Palestine — now Israel — then moved to France to study medicine. Kultgen's mother was a Jewish immigrant as
well, fleeing her native Ukraine after the Russian Revolution.

Her parents met in Paris, married and had Aline. They were there when the war broke out.

Kultgen’s
father was drafted into the French army when war was declared. Six
weeks later, the fighting was over.

Meanwhile, in the southern French town Brives, Kultgen's mother had died from an infection that
would have been easily treated by modern antibiotics, leaving her daughter in the
care of her father’s sister, Alice, and her husband, Robert.

After
the fighting, the family was reunited in Marseille where they spent a difficult
year before moving to a farm in Vaucluse for another year. Kultgen's father
later went to Lyon to direct the information service of the Resistance movement; during that time, Kultgen stayed in
nearby Le Puy with her aunt and uncle.

Blending
in was relatively easy. She was a French native, along with her Catholic uncle. Although her aunt had emigrated from Israel like her father, she was a
secular Jew and had been in France long enough to be fluent in the language and
culture.

This gave them a leg up over many Jewish refugees from war-torn
Eastern Europe who had a more difficult time avoiding attention.

“If someone asked, I was told to say I
was Protestant. I’m not even sure that I knew I was Jewish.”

Now, a casual observer might not know she was born in France. She doesn’t have a noticeable accent, although she speaks
French with a native’s pronunciation and confidence. She admires her adopted city, smiling at squirrels dashing
through the trees that grow up to her back door on a steep hill in her forested
back yard.

She doesn’t hesitate as she recalls her and her family’s past, but
she’s audibly somber at times, especially when she discusses particular
hardships.

Working a farm was difficult, for instance. Kultgen describes her family as “city
folk” who didn’t know the first thing about agriculture. Since farm owners
were not provided ration cards, they had a hard time scraping by.

They
had to be on the lookout for other ways to eat. Kultgen said her aunt
had a nice stroller from the city for walking Aline — so
nice that neighbors took notice and offered a trade.

That luxurious stroller became two large
sacks of barley, which would be a mainstay in their diet for months.

Their
stay on the farm came to an end more abruptly than planned. Some neighbors were always suspicious of her family.
Eventually, someone reported them to French authorities.

Although
they were in unoccupied France, the
government collaborated with the Germans. Kultgen still
remembers being rushed to pack up and leave quickly on a bus.

Had
they waited another hour, they would have been arrested, she said.

Kultgen then moved with her aunt and uncle to Le Puy where she lived until they left for America.
At the end of the war, Kultgen’s
aunt and uncle adopted her because her father never returned from his service with the Resistance movement.

Kultgen’s
surviving family did their best to shelter her from the details surrounding her
father’s death, but in recent years she has learned more.

Some came from a book of reports detailing events by witnesses, captured guards and others during and after the war; others are in a
collection of testimonials compiled by her uncle so she would be aware of her father’s character.

She now knows that a woman in her father’s Resistance group was having
an affair with a German officer, and her information led to dozens of
arrests, including Yves'.

He was held in Montluc, a municipal
prison still in use near Lyon, fromwhich
he was shuttled to Gestapo headquarters for brutal interrogation.

Meanwhile, the Allies had landed in Normandy and were sweeping east across France. Other Allied
troops coming north from the Mediterranean were less than 30 miles away. German
troops were falling back and destroying evidence of their crimes.

On Aug. 20, 1944, the Nazis rounded up two busloads of prisoners and took them to a nearby cemetery where they were taken to the caretaker’s house and
shot. The Nazis then burned the bodies and blew up the building.

An
estimated 120 people died that day. The only evidence Kultgen had that her father was
among them was a small piece of fabric that her uncle identified as part of a
shirt he was wearing.

Even after losing both her parents, Kultgen considers her childhood far better than others.

Circumstances weren’t as fortunate for many Jewish children during and after the war, she said: “A lot of children my age were
sent to Auschwitz, or had to hide, or were placed with families in less than
ideal situations. I was really lucky.”

In 1947, Kultgen's adoptive parents brought her to California.

She attended the
University of California-Berkeley as the Civil Rights movement was unfolding and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

“It was the
beginning of the free speech movement, an exciting time,” Kultgen said in her
living room. “Everyone was majoring in sociology. We were going to change the
world.”

She
reflected for a moment on the history after the Holocaust and the fight for civil
rights in America, then softly conceded that “we never did.”

“We’ve
come a long way in civil rights but we still have a long way to go,” she said
later, over the phone.

“We talk about the Holocaust and genocide, but there are
still genocides going on now. Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Darfur, Yugoslavia, Bosnia. There are still a lot of people killing other people and a lot of intolerance.
Our work is not done, not by a long shot.”

She married her first husband in
California, before moving
first to Minnesota, then Iowa where her daughter, Rachel, was born in 1964, then
back to California where she gave birth to son, Daniel, in 1966.

She moved to
Toronto in 1969 and then came to Columbia in 1972.

Before
becoming a teacher, she worked in Minnesota with the National Urban League and
then as a social worker for the county welfare department, licensing foster
homes.

It
was in Toronto that she first began working in a classroom, teaching French in
the newly bilingual nation. After moving to Columbia, she first worked with students who had learning disabilities at Oakland Junior High School, then taught French there and at Jefferson Junior High until her retirement.

She quickly earned the admiration
of other people in her department, including Annice Wetzel, a good
friend and
former colleague who now coordinates elementary French at
MU.

“Her
background is in learning disabilities,” Wetzel said. “She is
basically
able to teach anybody anything. She brought that to how we did French.”

Wetzel credits Kultgen for writing a
curriculum
and compiling a notebook of activities that came to be used at almost
every
school in the district.

“Her
students really appreciated her thoroughness,” Wetzel said. “She is able
to
break down complicated concepts into teachable parts. She really knows
how to teach something."

Her ability and commitment earned Kultgen the Lewis Award, given
to
outstanding teachers as recognized by their peers, in the late 1980s.

Her dedication to Holocaust remembrance was inspired by visits to France that revived childhood memories.

She first returned with her children in 1972, and they traveled to Lyon to see a memorial built in honor of her father and other
prisoners who were killed.

In 2004, she was part of a group of educators who
spent several weeks studying on a grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

The experience was
“life changing” for her. Though she’d been back to Lyon and had seen her
father’s grave, there was something different about talking to people who had
lived through it. They attended seminars in a Holocaust museum
that had been Gestapo headquarters.

“There were still
cells you could see downstairs as part of the museum,” she said. “It was real
to me in the present and real to me in the past. It was really emotionally and
intellectually a huge challenge.”

Since
then, she’s given dozens of lectures on the Holocaust and her experiences.

Kultgen and her
husband divorced after coming to Columbia, and in 1980 she married John Kultgen, an MU professor of philosophy who also has been an advocate for peace through the peace studies program on campus.

In the Kultgen's home it is apparent how much her family means to her.Dozens of pictures of her parents, two children and three grandchildren adorn a chest against the wall. She also treasures works by her
adoptive mother, local artist Alice de Boton, who lived in Columbia until her death
in April.

“She’s very
social, very intense, and she’s very intelligent,” her husband said. “I think she’s
concerned about people and concerned about social problems. The result is she
gets out in the world.”

During Holocaust
Remembrance Week in April, she gave a lecture to about 70 people in Ellis Auditorium
regarding her experiences in France during the 1940s. She told them we
should do more than just remember.

“We mustn’t think
of the Nazi perpetrators as these monsters unique to this period, that they’re
gone and we don’t have to worry about it,” Kultgen told her audience.

“The seeds for what the Nazis did exist in all of us,
including you and me. Under the right circumstances, normal people can do evil
things.

"We must learn from the past so thatthis doesn’t happen and stand up for our convictions despite what
others are doing.”